Talking to Employees Face-to-Face vs. Email - Spark Hire

Talking to Employees Face-to-Face vs. Email - Spark HireYour job isnt always a pleasant one sometimes you need to be the bad guy. While you get to be a pillar of support and help, you also have to be the heavy hand from time-to-time. There are many varying situations that will cause you to communicate with employees from day-to-day, but how you go about it is a very important part of building relationships in the arbeitszimmer.The two modes of office communication you will use most are face-to-face confrontations and email. While both are great ways to communicate, they also come with pitfalls if used in the wrong situations. Below are several tips that will help you choose between email and face-to-face confrontations when it comes to office communicationsEmailEmail is great because you can communicate with many people at once and save yourself hours and hours of time. They are also great for sending out minor reminders and memos to individual employees, and communicating with peopl e outside of the office. Technology has made things much easier for the professional world to function, but its important to not overdo it.Too much of a good thing is a bad thing so its important to not overuse email for office communications. If you need to reprimand anyone or remind someone of something they havent finished yet that they still need to, do not use email if you can avoid it. Meet them in part and tell them face-to-face. Email is impersonal and employees dont like to be told what to do and not to do from a screen. Also do not reprimand anyone in a public email if you have to do it that way. Thats humiliating, not conducive to a positive work environment, and may lead to an unsatisfied employee.Face-to-FaceBut where email fails in office communication, talking to someone face-to-face picks up the slack. When messages are of a more personal nature, go out of your way to talk to someone in-person. This can show the employee that you arent just some overseer who sees a n ame and information and sends out messages accordingly, but that you know them and care enough to go talk to them. It makes you a real person and will strengthen the overall bond between you and your coworkers.Of course, ansicht talks are much slower than email so if you have to send out a message to many people at once do so through email. Theres no point in sacrificing efficiency to tell the same thing to a hundred people.What do you find to be the most effective ways to communicate with employees in specificsituations? Share in the commentsIMAGE Courtesy of Flickr by Micky Aldridge